Hero of Rome

XXXVIII

The face that greeted him in Elysium was different. He knew it must be Elysium because it existed in a constant haze where pain was only a distant memory and soft hands soothed his brow and washed his body. Elysium came and went, but the face remained. Just occasionally earthly matters invaded the idyll that was the afterlife, a gnawing sense of responsibility or an unaccountable sadness, but they were small intrusions and always the face would be there to make them go away. Time in Elysium was an irrelevance and the body’s needs an illusion. It existed, and Valerius existed within it.

His first indication that Elysium might not be permanent came in a voice from the darkness in a language he knew but didn’t understand. And a name that was his own name. The voice was a rumbling, fractured thing and it was accompanied by a sensation alien to the ‘happy fields’ of the afterlife. Fear. It opened a door through which images marched like the dazzling flashes from the spear points of a distant legion. He saw savage, pitiless faces. A woman crouched and weeping over the body of a dead husband. Swords that rose and fell with merciless precision. And blood. Rivers of blood. Lakes of blood. Blood spattered across a wall, and blood that poured down the steps of a great temple. Screams echoed in his head and though he knew they were his own screams he couldn’t stifle them.

‘Valerius.’ The name again, but this time it was another voice, accompanied by the touch of a gentle hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and for the first time the face appeared in sharp focus. Something metallic was put to his mouth and a pleasant liquid ran down his throat. Just before he lost consciousness he remembered her name.

Maeve.

For a time it became difficult to distinguish where dream ended and reality began. Once, he heard a strange whistling sound and woke to find a hooded figure watching over him with a morbid, threatening presence and he knew he must be back in the Otherworld. On another occasion he felt a sharp pain as he fought for his life in a congested chamber, but moments later opened his eyes to find himself staring through a window at familiar stars, in a room that smelled of old smoke and had scorch marks on the limewashed walls.

He knew he was alive the next time he came awake because the stars were in the same place and he could see a tall, slim figure with a mane of dark hair silhouetted against them. ‘Maeve?’ The name came out as a growl from a week-old puppy.

She didn’t move and at first he feared it was another dream, but eventually she turned and moonlight part illuminated her face. She had changed, he saw immediately. His unconscious mind had painted her as she once was, but hunger and grief had melted the flesh from her bones. Now, dark shadows and deep hollows stood out in sharp contrast against the milky paleness of her skin, highlighting each plane and giving her the forbidding, unsmiling appearance of a much older woman. She is still beautiful, he thought, but beautiful in a different way: the way a fine sword can be both beautiful and dangerous.

He lay on a hard wooden bed with a mildewed blanket of rough wool pulled up to his neck and he didn’t realize how weak he’d become until he tried to raise himself. His bandaged head throbbed as if it were about to burst open and every limb weighed more than he could lift. She noticed his struggles and quickly crossed the room to pour liquid from an earthenware jug into a cup. But when she raised the cup to his lips he caught the scent of the herb-infused beer Cearan had given him in the wood and he knew instinctively that this was what had kept him asleep.

He turned his head to one side. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me.’

A veil fell over her eyes and at first he thought she was going to refuse him, but after a moment’s hesitation she began to talk quietly, her eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the window.

She told how Boudicca had ridden south at the head of an army thirty thousand strong, burning and slaughtering anything in her path which was tainted by contact with the despised Romans, and how their ranks had been swelled by warrior bands from the Catuvellauni and Trinovante. ‘Each fought to outdo the other in their prowess on the battlefield and in their cruelty, for each felt they had suffered most at the hands of your people,’ Maeve explained, as if it somehow excused the excesses: the impalings and the burnings and the rapes.

Of all Roman works, the Temple of Claudius symbolized the shame of occupation and Boudicca had used that symbol to fan the flames of her followers’ hatred into an inferno of unthinking and unquestioning rage. ‘She ordered them to desecrate the god’s image and pull down the temple, stone by stone, and cast it into the river. It is an abomination on this land, she told them, and we will wipe it from memory as we will wipe the Romans from memory.’

When they reached the slope north of Colonia and looked down upon the pathetic force facing them, Boudicca’s warriors had laughed at the prospect of meeting the old men of the militia. Others, more experienced in war, counselled caution, but it was the young men who prevailed. So Boudicca had sent them over the bridge to their deaths.

‘Three thousand killed and three thousand more with wounds that will keep them from the fight for many weeks,’ Maeve lamented. ‘They were the mightiest champions of the three tribes and she can ill afford their loss.’

By the time Boudicca reached the temple she expected to see it in flames and the statues toppled. She raged and tore her hair and demanded that it be taken by nightfall and destroyed by dawn. But the Romans in the temple denied her for two more days and, frustrated, she had led her army towards Londinium before she could witness its destruction.

‘You know the rest,’ Maeve said. ‘They spared none.’

He had many questions, but none stayed in his mind long enough to form completely. In the end he realized there was only one thing he truly needed to know.

‘Why do I live when everyone else died?’

Maeve gave him a strange, fey look and he became aware of a third presence in the room. A hooded figure rose from the shadows close to the door and limped towards the bed. Valerius recognized it from his dreams and felt a shiver run through him. The hood fell slowly back and he looked into the face of a monster.

Crespo’s sword had taken Cearan high on the left side of his forehead, splitting scalp and skull before it cut diagonally across his face. The force of the blow destroyed the left eye socket and turned the eye into a red pulp that was like looking into the mouth of a volcano. Relentlessly, the sword’s edge had carved through the bridge of the Iceni’s elegant nose, shattering bone and cartilage and leaving a gaping pink-lipped cavity through which his breath whistled noisily. Finally the blade stripped the flesh from his upper right lip and removed three teeth before breaking his lower jaw, which now hung unnaturally low, giving his face a permanent sideways tilt. The result was an abomination of the human visage. When he spoke, it was in the British tongue and only the left side of his mouth moved, so the words emerged as a guttural, unintelligible mumble that still managed to convey the force of his anger. Maeve translated the words for Valerius.

‘He has vowed that your language will never cross his lips again and he wishes you to know first that you are his enemy, to the death.’ She hesitated as Cearan continued. ‘When Boudicca offered you half of her kingdom, you took it all. When she offered you peace, you brought swords. You have killed his wife and his sons, ruined his tribe and defiled its women.’

Valerius attempted to raise himself again, despite the blinding pain it caused, driven by an irrational need to deny it all even though he knew every word was true. Maeve put a hand on his shoulder and forced him gently back.

‘His own injuries are of no consequence; it is the injury to his people which must be avenged. That is why he refused to stay behind when Boudicca took her army to bring down the temple of the false god. He exulted as Colonia burned and in the final attack on the temple his hate and his desire for vengeance drove him even in front of the champions. He recognized you among your soldiers and took his sword to you. When you fell, he thought to kill you, but, at the last, his blade was turned aside by the memory of past friendship and the life he owed you.’

Valerius had a vision of the golden-haired child swept away in the river at Venta. He forced himself to look into Cearan’s ravaged face. The single eye burned like a dying ember in a blacksmith’s forge and he realized the damage to the Briton went much deeper than the physical disfigurement of his features.

‘Still, you might have been cut piece from piece as your comrades were, your limbs hung from the trees like fruit, but Cearan stayed the swords, saying he wanted you for his own pleasure, to destroy you a little at a time in the name of revenge. Two of his men carried you from the temple and then, more secretly, here, to my father’s farm.

‘Your enemy, the Roman Crespo, is also dead.’ Valerius winced as she related the details of Crespo’s terrible end. It was difficult to believe any man, however cruel, deserved such a death. Yet, if what she said was true, the centurion’s treatment of Boudicca’s daughters was as much the cause of the rebellion as druid plotting or Decianus’s greed. No amount of pain could make amends for the blood of tens of thousands of innocents.

In the long silence which followed Valerius tried to reconcile the conflicting thoughts and memories and feelings that whirled through his head. Logic said he should hate them both because they had helped destroy everything in which he believed. Instead, all he felt was a melancholy so powerful it threatened to crush him flat. He didn’t understand how he could still love Maeve, yet somewhere beyond the pain his feelings for her were as strong as ever. Nothing could change what had happened, but neither could anything wipe away what they had shared. Did she feel it too? If she did she gave no hint. From the first moment he regained consciousness she had never once met his eyes.

‘What will happen now?’ he asked.

She turned away and he knew she was hiding tears. ‘When you are well enough to travel, we will help you return to your people.’

He nodded his thanks.

‘But you should know that life comes at a price, Valerius.’

She took his right hand and pulled it towards her as he heard the hiss of Cearan’s sword clearing its scabbard. With a thrill of horror he realized the significance of the blazing fire and the stink of boiling pitch.

The sword flashed down and a sting of exquisite agony was the last thing he knew.